...The problems of race and urban poverty remain pressing challenges which the United States has yet to address. Changes in the global economy, technology, and race relations during the last 30 years have necessitated new and innovative analyses and policy responses. A common thread which weaves throughout many of the studies reviewed here is the dynamics of migration. In When Work Disappears, immigrants provide comparative data with which to highlight the problems of ghetto poverty affecting blacks. In No Shame in My Game, Puerto Rican and Dominican immigrants are part of the changing demographics in Harlem. In Canarsie, the possible migration of blacks into a working/middle-class neighborhood prompts conservative backlash from a traditionally liberal community. In Streetwise, the migration of yuppies as a result of gentrification, and the movement of nearby-ghetto blacks into these urban renewal sites also invoke fear of crime and neighborhood devaluation among the gentrifying community. Not only is migration a common thread, but the persistence of poverty, despite the current economic boom, is the cornerstone of all these works. Poverty, complicated by the dynamics of race in America, call for universalistic policy strategies, some of which are articulated in Poor Support and The War Against the Poor. In When Work Disappears, William Julius Wilson builds upon many of the insights he introduced in The Truly Disadvantaged, such as the rampant joblessness, social isolation, and...
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...structural power relations ignite oppression and discrimination. I have chosen to look at this in relation to poverty and race. This essay aims to define discrimination and oppression, and relate this to what is evident when talking about poverty and race and discuss the implications for the young people I work with. The literal meaning of discriminate is to identify a difference. When the term is used in a legal, moral or political sense it is generally used to refer to unfair discrimination, this refers to the process where a difference is identified and used to impose unfair treatment. Oppression is the outcome of unfair treatment. associated with discrimination has oppressive consequences for the people so affected. It is important to note the differences between anti/discriminatory and anti-oppressive practice are primarily semantic, rather than theoretical or ideological. What is paramount is that as care and social workers we all must tackle this issue head on, without fear of opening a can of worms. Poverty is an issue that has been talked about for many years in Scotland. Nethetheless, in despite severity of the situation, and regardless of the impact on our youth, and ultimately the future of our country. Even though legislation put in place to ensure the well being of our children, it can be argued that not enough is being done to tackle the issue. Poverty is an issue which raises much debate but little seems to be happening to minimise it. It is sad that in...
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...Poverty has become a major issue all over the globe. In the United States the Poverty Line has increased since the Great Recession in 2008. The Poverty Line rose from 12.5% in 2007 to 15.0% in 2011, According to The Russell Sage Foundation and The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality’s Poverty and The Great Recession . The downfall of the economy in 2008 pushed many people in the U.S. into poverty. Systematic failures such as an unstable economy, societal factors such as race or ethnicity, and many would argue one of the greatest causes of poverty to be natural disasters. Two major accounts of economical instability are noted as “The Great Depression” which occurred in the 1930s and “The Great Recession,” in 2008. The two events sent many Americans into poverty. The Great Depression was a result of a stock market crash and a bad banking structure. Likewise the Recession was due to a stock market crash caused 8 trillion dollar housing bubble. According to Jim Puzzanghera, from The Los Angeles Times, approximately 8.7 million jobs were lost during...
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...between different position within a system of social stratification 1. Horizontal 2. Vertical 3. Structural 4. Exchange Why the class structure is changing -Massive growth in inequality between the rich and the poor. Called the “Great U-Turn” -Shrinking of the working class, with some growth in middle class and working poor. -Growth of poverty and the “underclass” -Rate of poverty is increasing twice as fast as population growth Why income inequality is increasing -Largely due to the increasing concentration of wealth at the very top of the income distribution. consequences of income inequality -High levels of income inequality reduces social cohesion, overall health, overall wealth, and education -Increases crime, debt, and political polarization Social construction of race -Instead, social scientists argue that “race” is socially constructed. Racial categories and the meaning of race vary over time and geographically. Racial status is differentially connected to systems of social inequality. The meaning and inequalities connected with race are constantly defined and contested. Race- Externally imposed, involuntary, hierarchal, exclusive, unequal vs. ethnicity- Cultural/National, voluntary, self-defined, fluid, non-hierarchal...
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...Economic Crisis: Credit Cards? Or Race Cards? The story of Economic Inequality Hung Nguyen University of Massachusetts Amherst Econ 104: Introduction to Macroeconomics Professor Robert Pollin: TA Carlos Marenta Since before the founding of our country, the American way of life has, and continues to be, hypocritical to the first lines of the Declaration of Independence. “That all men are created equal.” The lines that every American should hold dear to the heart, and many even lose their lives to uphold. America has seen many times of economic downturn, and economic prosperity. Though for African Americans; economics has been consistently been a downturn. The opportunity to play a role in, and to enjoy economic prosperity has always been an uphill battle for these groups. Racial inequality in America has always been inconsistent with equal opportunity in the job market. Which ultimately means that groups such as African Americans have always been deprived of their equal rights to fairly compete for jobs. Because the level of playing field is heavily shifted against minority groups and woman, there will always be high unemployment for these groups. What people tend to forget to realize is that this disparity in equal opportunity hurts the overall economy. When the nations employers deprive particular groups of economic opportunity, unemployment rises, and when unemployment rises, the poverty level will also rise. This is especially true for the case of African American...
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...Most of the time, there are some characteristics and factors in person’s life that they can’t choose them. These characteristics include race, gender, and class. The film Precious directed by Lee Daniel in 2009 represents life of a young, illiterate girl, who suffers from sexual abuse and home violence as nobody can protect her except her old grandmother. The plot of the film shows that how the main character’s life has been affected by these characteristics. Throughout the movie we see that Precious does not live but exists in the world of a relentless treatment of her family at home and peers at school. Thus, the main idea of the film reveals that race and gender inequality can destroy the life of a black girl, who goes through several stages...
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...The disparities between income and economic status between races is staggering and is steadily continuing to rise. For Americans, evidence between the economic/racial differences within our economy lies within and are tied to our socioeconomic resources. Within Metropolitan areas of large cities, residential segregation is quite prominent and with residential segregation, lies a divide in socioeconomic status and the overall average income for those areas. Many studies have been conducted to observe the interplay and effects of this socioeconomic divide between races and collect data on the consequences and patterns in terms of schooling, employment, community resources, crime rates, single parenthood, and health. Socioeconomic status within...
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...care and are more apt to consider the emergency department their medical care home than whites. It is known that minorities are less likely to use any medical service or receive preventive care. Their rates of preventable hospitalizations and unmet health needs are substantially higher than those of Caucasians. A complexity of these disparities may be caused by the physician’s failure to participate in the Medicaid program. In a recent study is showed Medicaid recipients were almost half as likely to be offered an appointment within one week compared with those claiming to have private insurance. This article also looks at the connection between the patient’s race and the physician’s participation in Medicaid. The question is to whether physicians' participation is linked to residential segregation based on poverty or race and whether the racial composition of the Medicaid population itself matters. There were three hypotheses that were tested. They are: 1. Physicians are more likely to accept Medicaid patients in areas where the poor are white. 2. Physicians are less likely to accept Medicaid patients in areas that are more racially segregated. 3. Physicians are less likely to accept Medicaid. The Medicaid Segregation Hypothesis Sloan and colleagues influenced what they call the “two-market demand model”. Physicians prefer to treat private-paying patients until the point at which the marginal revenue in the private market falls below the Medicaid fee. In urban areas...
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...Race and Poverty: Factors of the African American Achievement Gap Abstract The proposed action research study will pinpoint factors that contribute to the African American academic achievement gap. These factors impact not only the lives of families in the African American community but continues a vicious cycle of generations of poverty that hinders our country’s ability to effectively compete economically and also threatens America’s capacity to provide social equality for all. The participants in this study will comprise of parents and students of highly concentrated poverty - low academically performing African American public schools. Thirty two parents and thirty two students from eight low performing-poverty schools in the research study will be interviewed and surveyed online. Collected information and data will be researched employing qualitative and quantitative practices. Introduction There was a time when children of color were denied the hope and expectation of equal education because of racial isolation and discrimination in America’s education system. Although it’s been well over 50 years since Brown –vs.- The Board of Education which established equal education for all, today we are still faced with large racial disparities in reading and math proficiency between African American children and their thriving white contemporaries. This purpose of this study is to illustrate the connection that occurs between race and poverty with the academic...
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...But the people working will have to take a segregation test to be ready to be in an area of poverty and with race that is not there own. This would help to get people to be comfortable with other race and not have be segregated. This would help reduce segregation and would show people that not everything should be different.In some way everyone is the same but with different characteristics.This is my plan to help minimize social injustice and to help people from...
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...Thesis The problems of finding employment, dealing with Urban Crime and Race-Ethnics and how it has affected our cities, will be the focus of this paper. Handleman 2011, Kruger (2007), Urban Poverty, Mehta is the references have chosen to use to help explain the issue with Employment, Crime and Race in our Urban Communities. Urban crime is a major problem in Latin- America and the African Cities, but East Asia's major urban areas are generally safer than large Americans. Race also plays a role in regards to being poor. Contemporary Third World urbanization differs from the West's earlier urban explosion into important respects. Many of the poor who are unable to find work in the so-called formal sectors of the urban economy (the government and more modern, private-sector enterprise) turn to the informal economy for jobs (Handleman 2011). FACTS AND FIGURES ON POVERTY A quarter of the world's population, 1.3 billion people, lives in severe poverty... • Nearly 800 million people do not get enough food, and about 500 million people are chronically malnourished. More than a third of children are malnourished. • In industrial countries more than 100 million people live below the poverty line, more than 5 million people are homeless and 37 million are jobless. • Of the world's 23 million people living with HIV/AIDS more than 93% live in developing countries. • More than 840 million adults are illiterate - 538 million of them are women. • In developing countries 160 million...
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...Poverty is all over the world whether we see it or not. In, “The Position of Poverty by Galbraith” talks about how it is not hard to get in poverty, but it is hard to get out with the world today. American Society is at fault for insular poverty because of the lack of job opportunities, lack of opportunities for those born into poverty, and the lack of equal schooling opportunities. American Society does not offer many jobs, so this makes it harder to find job opportunities. In the story, it says, “People are poverty-stricken when their income, even if adequate for survival. falls radically behind that of the community.” (Galbraith 1) Even with a minimum wage job that is not enough income to raise a family off of. Also, in the earlier times...
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...For as long as we know, race has always been a major issue in our world and throughout time leaving people to believe that race is something that determines an individual. With the movements and progress that has been made throughout the years, it has let people better understand evils of race and how it is not something that should be of importance when deciding on where an individual stands in the world. People have always misconstrued an individual’s particular race with that as something that describes that person as a whole. Because of an individual’s race, this was something that was said to predict where people would fall in the community and this would lay out what chances an individual had in the working world in comparison to someone else. In reading William Julius Wilson’s thoughts on the idea of race and how it has been a major if not the most crucial reasoning to where a person stands in the world, I have been informed of what dilemmas there are that have and still occur today. I have been informed of the idea that race is unfortunately what people depict when they create an outcome for a particular individual. During the 20th century, it was now a period of time where it was no longer race that was as central of an issue, but it was now class position that was said to have the most importance of where people stood, Black individuals to be specific. When viewing the issues that lie within cities involving poverty, it has been said to focus rather on universal conclusions...
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...Africa is a desert like the remaining continent of Africa is; this is as far from the truth as possible. Would you have ever thought that two countries could be so similar yet so different at the same time? South Africa is as up in the technology world as the United States is; if not further along to some degree. It is known to have the largest research association of great white sharks off of any coast. Although the United States and South Africa have several similarities, they are also quite different because the United States has a lower violence and poverty rate than South Africa. One similarity between the Unites States and South Africa is that they are a huge melting pot of ethnicity and race, that had to fight for what they believed was right between the higher percentages of races. Both countries races consist of whites, blacks, Asians, and Indians. But there is a huge difference in the race percentages’, according to "Race and Ethnicity in the United States" (n.d.), the majority of the more than 300 million people currently living in the United States consists of White Americans, who trace their ancestry to the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. In South Africa, black's makeup 79.0% of the total population ("Ethnic Groups in South Africa", n.d.). The percentage of all white households that are made up of individuals is 19.1%; this is a complete flip-flop in the United States, where there are more whites than blacks. Asians hold a pretty consistent...
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...quality of life and psychological and social well-being. The problem of social inequality has been found to be linked with other social problems such as crime and victimization. The problem of social inequality can even be seen in the criminal justice system in how it treats people of various races, ethnic groups and socioeconomic classes who are processed through the system (Wheelock, 2006). In essence, there exists a disparity amongst race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class in criminal victimization and how people are processed through the criminal justice system that exacerbates the social problem of inequality in numerous social institutions and complicates many individual’s efforts to escape from poverty and achieve upward mobility (Wheelock, 2006). The disparity in criminal punishment is due to various factors such as laws that were implemented to reduce crime, race, and low economic status (Wheelock, 2006). The factors that have a tremendous impact on victimization are demography and socioeconomic status (Raphael, 2006). While violent crimes are not exclusive to poor metropolitan areas, consistent patterns have been observed which reveal lower rates of crime in neighborhoods with low poverty and higher rates of crime in poor metropolitan areas (Raphael, 2006). These poor metropolitan areas are usually segregated, have lower quality of education, fewer employment opportunities, and contain larger minority populations such as African Americans and Hispanics (Raphael, 2006). Thus...
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